


Seeing Colours

by regentzilla



Category: Mother 2: Gyiyg no Gyakushuu | EarthBound
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-17 07:29:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5859784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regentzilla/pseuds/regentzilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ness' powers let him see the emotions of other people as a colour, and his friends have colours so bright and new that they change the way Ness sees his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Healy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Healy/gifts).



The first thing Ness and Paula did when they got back to Twoson, after being fretted over by Paula's dad and telling the thrilling tale of Paula's rescue to a pack of enraptured children, was sleep.

“I love my parents, but they're... a lot... especially my dad,” Paula said with a laugh, seated on the curb outside the preschool with her head resting on her teddy. “D'you ever feel like you need a nap after talking to your family?”

Ness didn't but he offered a sympathetic nod and bumped his shoulder against Paula's, not sure if they were friends enough for a hug yet. Ness stood and stretched, and Paula followed. They made a beeline for the hotel.

The heavy curtains in the hotel room blocked out most of the light from the midday sun, leaving a hot, bright sliver peeking in through the bottom. The beds were gigantic and cloudlike and Ness fell asleep on top of the covers, and when he woke again his hat was squished between the pillow and his face and the light from beneath the curtain had warmed and stretched long across the carpet.

Paula's bed was a mess, to say the least – the pillows were on the floor, the blankets were bunched up in a wad at her feet, and the sheets were tangled and twisted around her legs. When Ness called her name she jolted awake and sat up, eyes still closed and hair in a frenzy around her head, and squeezed her teddy close to her chest.

“It's getting late,” Ness said, voice as quiet as he could get it, “you wanna go get some food?”

Paula smiled and nodded without opening her eyes, then stood and stumbled to the bathroom to run a brush through her hair, still holding her teddy by the arm. Ness felt pretty crummy for waking her up, because it seemed like she'd just gotten some proper rest out of an otherwise fitful sleep, but food was just as important. At least Ness thought so.

Paula still looked out of sorts when she re-emerged, but much tidier. Ness thought she might leave the teddy bear in their room but Paula took her along, ignoring the look she got from the man at the front desk as they passed by him to get to the ATM.

“I get an allowance from my dad,” Ness said, pushing his card in and tapping a few buttons. “He put 700 dollars in.”

Paula gaped. “Seriously!?”

The machine spat Ness' card back out with a beep and he tucked it away in his pocket. “He works really far away and he spoils me a lot since he's never home. I mean... it's nice, always having stuff, but I wish he'd just visit more instead.” He rubbed a hand under his nose and sniffed hard then adjusted the straps of his backpack, head down and eyes obscured by the brim of his hat.

Paula stared at her feet. She didn't want to pressure Ness into hurrying for her sake, but as soon as she looked away he recovered, boisterous as ever and grinning like there hadn't been any kind of lapse in his bright mood. “Anyway, that's not important right now. The real issue is dinner! Pizza or burgers?”

They settled on pizza, then found a quiet bench overlooking Burglin Park and placed the box between them to share. Paula spread paper napkins over her lap and made sure her teddy was seated at a safe distance before going in for her first greasy slice – Ness didn't bother.

“So... what kind of psychic powers do you have?” Paula said, then covered her mouth with one hand and giggled. “Sorry, I'm just excited... I've never been able to ask someone that before!”

Ness grinned. “Me neither! It's kinda cool, being able to hang out with someone who gets it. I think you saw most of my powers already, on the way back... I can talk to animals too, but only ones that are already friendly, and I can see people's thoughts. Not the whole thought, just the feeling, as a colour that kinda floats around them like they're glowing. If I look right at it, it disappears.” 

Paula nearly dropped her pizza. “Talking to animals! What's that like?”

Ness shrugged. “I dunno. I've done it since I was a baby, so it's just normal for me. I like dogs the most, though, they never want to talk about serious things.”

"And seeing thoughts... isn't that called empathetic synaesthesia, or something?"

Ness laughed out loud. "What does that even mean?"

Paula smiled and kicked her feet back and forth under the bench. "I read it in a book about kids with psychic powers. My dad bought it when I was a toddler, right after the first time I set something on fire. Almost none of it was right but it makes me happy that he wanted to know more about me." She paused and looked over at Ness, thinking silent for a moment, then smiled. “I think your powers are cooler than mine.”

“Really?”

“Really.” She looked back out at Burglin Park. “I wish I could see thoughts. I wanna be a teacher someday. How great would it be to see if kids are sad or happy or anything else?”

“It's not so great, sometimes, being able to see that people are sad. Especially when there's nothing you can do.”

Paula hummed. “At least the colour gives you a clue. And your powers can help when someone is hurt! Like, what can I do?” She held her hands close then moved them apart, spreading her fingers as she went, miming something bursting into flames, and made an explosion noise with her mouth. “There! Feel any better?”

Ness laughed until he came close to choking on his pizza and had to stop and take a few gulps from his can of juice before he spoke. “Yeah, but you seriously saved my life with all the...” he made the same gesture that Paula had with one hand, pizza in the other, and made the same noise. “It's so cool! Your enemies don't stand a chance!”

Paula looked down at the sauce-spotted napkins on her lap. “...My friends don't either. Everyone in town is nice and all, and they like me, but they kinda keep their distance.”

Ness paused thoughtful. “I guess I understand. That's so mean, though. And it's making you blue, literally, so stop thinking about it! I dunno if I'll ever be able to look at blue again without feeling all staticky.”

That made Paula smile.

“And don't worry about lighting me on fire,” Ness said in his very best matter-of-fact tone, turning back to his pizza. He clearly wasn't about to field any arguments on the subject. “I can take it.”

Paula smiled down at her pizza, then out at Burglin Park when she got her watering eyes back under control. She believed him, one hundred percent.


	2. Chapter 2

Nights in Fourside were always bright and loud and warm, and no matter how far away from the heart of the city they stayed Ness could never sleep for long. The loudest sounds he was used to hearing at night were crickets or the distant howl of neighbourhood dogs. The constant noise of passing cars below the hotel window and the flash of neon signs that outblazed the stars made their way inside the room, no matter how tightly they tried to close it up.

Evidently, Jeff couldn't sleep either. It was one of those nights when he stayed up tinkering and fixing things until the sun rose, and Ness sat in bed watching him silently for a few minutes. There was something relaxing about his total concentration, the rhythms he fell into as he tightened screws or twisted wires together. His back was turned tonight, though, towards the lamp he had taken from the bedside table and plugged into a low outlet in the kitchenette, and Ness couldn't see what he was working on.

Their first foray into the department store after Paula and her captors had been a total disaster. They got out okay, without having to make a stop at the hospital, but spent a lot of silent time licking their wounds and injured morale in the hotel before grudgingly going to bed for the night.

“Can't sleep either?” Ness whispered, as quiet as he could manage. He didn't want to startle Jeff and make him accidentally hurt himself on whatever experiment was brewing in front of him.

Jeff's shoulders rose and dropped with a sigh. “Not at all.”

“Can I come see what you're doing?”

Jeff glanced over his shoulder, glasses flashing as he turned, and smiled and nodded. “It's a little embarrassing... I've never tried something like this before.”

Now Ness was excited. He tossed the covers back and leapt to the floor, cringing as he stepped from carpet to linoleum and his bare feet hit the cool tiles. He sat cross-legged next to Jeff, tucking his cold toes against his warm legs in their soft pajama bottoms.

The exciting new experiment that Jeff was holding was Paula's teddy bear. It had gotten dropped in the scuffle at the department store, and in the blur of fights afterwards one of its arms had come off, leaving a fray of worn strings and a fluff of stuffing behind. Ness hadn't noticed Jeff pick up the arm, but he must have found it because he was stitching it back on with a careful but wobbly hand. Jeff's left index finger flashed with metal every time his hand moved and Ness caught sight of a makeshift thimble, one that looked like Jeff had bent and molded it out of a spare scrap of metal himself.

“Wow,” Ness said, leaning in to get a better look, both at the bear and the thimble.

Jeff stopped sewing and rubbed his fingers across the embossed surface of the Franklin badge stuck to his jacket lapel – another item that had been in Paula's posession until a few hours ago. Ness couldn't see his eyes – Jeff was an expert at angling his head just right so that the thick lenses of his glasses caught the light and obscured his eyes – but the fact that they were hidden told Ness all he needed to know. He didn't even have to see Jeff's thoughts to know he was worried sick.

He bumped his elbow gently into Jeff's. "You okay?" He whispered, even though nobody but the two of them were in the room, and Ness was sure the walls were thick enough to be soundproof. Jeff always scolded them whenever Ness and Paula (but mostly Ness) got a little too rowdy, saying they should be respectful of other people, but Ness could tell he was just shy. It was the way he darted his eyes around while saying it, making sure nobody was staring.

Jeff sighed and Ness caught a lightning quick glimpse at his usually iron-cast and impenetrable thoughts. They were pink, dull and faded like a plush toy left out in a storm and not the vibrant and orangeish sunset pink that thoughts of Paula usually were.

“I'm just worried,” Jeff said. For someone without any psychic powers, his brain and thoughts were some of the strongest ones Ness had ever encountered. He must have been seriously distressed to be letting so many accidental flashes of emotion bubble out.

“She'll be fine!” Ness replied, catching his voice before he got too shouty. “She's tough.”

Jeff nodded and smiled a little. “I think I'm just as concerned about us rescuing her on our own.”

For someone who held himself with such confidence and never faltered when it came to answering questions about math or science or things like that, Jeff spent a lot of time worrying about people.

“You know,” Jeff said, pondering very seriously down at the bear, “I might have never left Winters if Paula hadn't called for me. I've never really had someone who pushes me to do so much.”

“You have Tony, don't you?”

Jeff smiled. The fondness and love behind it was apparent in his eyes, but it was accompanied by a little sadness too. “Tony's much more patient with me than I sometimes need. Or deserve.”

Ness nodded and rocked back and forth thoughtfully, hands gripping his crossed ankles. “Paula sure knows when you kick your butt, doesn't she?”

“She does,” Jeff smiled, then turned the teddy bear back and forth in his hands and gave the re-attached arm a gentle tug. “How does it look?”

The line of stitches had a few wobbles and the spacing between them was uneven, but the arm was back on the bear and wasn't budging. Ness took in the teddy's new appearance, beat up and worn in spots and now re-assembled, and decided that it looked very well-loved.

“It looks perfect,” Ness said with a nod. “Paula's going to be happy that you took such good care of her.”

Jeff took his handmade thimble off and rolled it between his palms as he thought. “I just... want to make sure I'm worth the trouble of having me along.”

“You don't have to always be doing something to be worth it,” Ness said, “just being a friend is enough.”

“But there's so much at stake,” Jeff exclaimed, and then continued in a quieter voice, “and I'm not a psychic. I have to carry my weight.”

“And you can! I don't know anything about most of the stuff you know about. I think your bottle rockets are scarier than whatever my brain can do.” That got a short laugh out of Jeff, which was what Ness was hoping for. “You can do tons of stuff that only you can, and sometimes there's stuff that only me or Paula can do. When that happens we can carry each others' weight. That's what friends do.”

Jeff looked down at the teddy in his lap, glasses flashing with light that hid his eyes, and nodded.

The two of them sat together on the floor in silence for a while, listening to the thrum of the city outside.

“If we both can't sleep,” Jeff said, breaking the silence as quietly as possible, “then what are we doing here?”

Ness looked over at him, legs tucked up against his chest and head resting on his knees. “You think we can do it this time?”

Jeff stood and stretched his arms over his head. “I think so. We just have to go in with a strategy. And now that teddy's feeling better she can help too.”

Ness jumped to his feet as well and rushed to the nightstand next to his bed to retrieve his hat and jam it on over his bedhead. “That's the spirit! You'll be the one kicking our butts in no time.”


	3. Chapter 3

Every morning, before the sun rose, Poo woke up and left the hotel room for the beach.

It took a while for Ness to figure out where he was going, because he snuck out earlier than any of the others woke up and was always back before they brushed their teeth. Ness tried his best to reserve drinking coffee for emergencies, because his mother always said it was bad for kids and Jeff drank it a lot and said it didn't even wake him up anymore, but Ness' curiosity had grown so great that he decided to class it as an emergency and pull an all-nighter.

The morning looked strange and pale from behind tired-puffy eyes. The streets and the shores of Summers were calm and empty in the cool hours before the shops opened, save for a handful of tourists meandering back to their hotels along the boardwalk. Ness wasn't sure if it was his own exhaustion or if everyone else was just having an emotional morning, but the colours of everyone he passed were vibrant and easy to see, even if he concentrated. He knew Poo's thoughts as soon as he saw them, wavering up from him like a mirage on the shore.

Poo's thoughts weren't as guarded as Jeff's, nor were they as bright as Paula's. They were a kind of subdued and calm that Ness had never seen before in anyone, and the moment he saw them swirling around the older boy on the day they met he wanted to know more. Ness was well aware that he sometimes got a little carried away in his excitement and acted like a little kid around Poo, because he liked him a lot and wanted to seem fun, but Poo never seemed to mind. His thoughts never wavered too far from their calm default, warm colours that changed between shades as smoothly as waves washing against a shore.

They blended in with the sunrise this morning, a fiery aura around Poo's still frame as he sat cross-legged in the sand. As Ness watched him, enraptured with the sight, the colours calmed and cooled and became brilliant blue as the sun rose from behind Poo's body and rose into the sky.

It took a few minutes for Ness to compose himself, tug off his shoes and carefully wad up his socks inside them, and plod down the beach to where his friend was sitting.

“Good morning,” Poo said, long before Ness had reached his side.

“G'morning,” Ness replied, dropping his shoes with a sandy whump and sitting down next to Poo, mimicking his pose, back straight and hands on his bent knees. “How did you know it was me?”

“Your thoughts have a very unique colour.”

Ness jumped up onto his knees in excitement and balled his hands into fists, staring at Poo, who hadn't yet opened his eyes. “You can see colours!?”

Poo cracked open one eye and glanced at Ness, sending his heart racing even faster. Any remnants of tiredness he felt were forgotten. “In a way. Most people with our kind of psychic powers can. I think the way I see them might be different from the way you do.”

“Mine are like,” Ness gestured, drawing the silhouette of a person in the air with his hands. “Like an aura? If I look at someone's face I can see them, but if I look at the aura it disappears.”

Poo nodded. “That sounds beautiful. Mine are a bit more... abstract. I get a feeling from someone, which feels like a colour.”

Ness mimicked the way Poo nodded, slow and solemn. “So you can see people who are behind you, like I was, because you just get a feeling.”

“If I concentrate I can get a feeling about everyone in Summers. It helps to meditate and keep my thoughts clear of all that.”

There was a pause, filled with the rhythmic shush of waves. “What kind of colours do I look like? If it's okay for me to ask...” Ness knew firsthand what it was like to have people ask strange questions about his powers. He'd never want to make a friend feel uncomfortable like that.

Poo scrunched his nose in thought. “A pencil crayon,” he said, “one of the ones with all the colours melted together, that changes through them as you use it.”

“Wow,” Ness said, voice quiet. “I like that.”

Poo stood and stretched easy and began a slow walk down the beach, like he knew Ness was getting restless. He always walked at a pace that Ness' slightly shorter legs could keep up with. “How does it compare to the way you see yourself?”

“I dunno,” Ness said, kicking up sand in front of him as he walked, swinging his shoes back and forth in his hands.

“You've never looked at your own colours?”

Ness tilted his head in confusion. “I... no? I don't think I can see them.”

“You might be looking too hard. Didn't you say that you can only see them from the corner of your eye?”

“I'm too close to myself to look at them,” Ness said with a laugh, “I can't really take a few steps away from my own body so I can see it all at once.”

Poo smiled, a rare and gentle quirk of his lips. “Have you tried closing your eyes?”

They were passing more and more beachgoing tourists as they went, and almost all of them were giving the duo strange looks. Ness was in shorts and a t-shirt, but Poo's austere white gi was hardly appropriate for fun in the sun.

Ness tried closing his eyes for several silent moments, which he was sure just made tourists stare even harder. He tried concentrating and thinking about other things and crossing his eyes behind his eyelids, but all he could see was the orangeish glow of the sun through them.

He opened them again with a sigh and squinted against the light. “I don't think that's gonna help.”

“Fair enough,” Poo nodded. “What works for someone isn't right for everyone. Although watching how you do things has helped me see my own colours in a different way.”

Ness boggled, trying to imagine himself helping Poo, strong and tall and wise and royal, with anything. Poo must have spotted Ness' incredulous expression – or read it in his colours – because he laughed.

“S-sorry, I just... really?”

“Really and truly!” Poo said, without a moment's hesitation. “I spent a lot of time hurrying through childhood to become a prince, and now with you and Paula and Jeff I'm learning how to be a child again. Even though our mission is very serious, I wouldn't hesitate to call it fun.”

Ness could feel redness warming over his face and tried to tell himself it was the rising sun. “Well,” he said, a little hasty, “if you're going to be a kid you should probably learn to sleep in sometimes.”

Poo laughed once again.

“And, to be honest...” Ness shuffled his feet so the sand sifted between his toes. “I've learned a lot from you. And from Paula and Jeff. I dunno if I would have been able to help you with anything if you hadn't been helping me be strong in the first place.”

“Isn't that what friendship is all about?”

Ness thought about it and let the feeling wash over him, from his heart to the rest of his body. “I'm glad to have you as my best friends,” he said.

“Nothing in my life has made me happier,” Poo replied. “And, as your best friend who knows you very well, I believe you'll be able to see your own colours someday. All it takes is faith in your own strength and brightness, and I can see that you have plenty of both.”

Ness felt sparkly all over. He believed it, one hundred percent.


End file.
